DVDs We Love: Rush Hour 2 (2001)

This should be an easy transition: as you know, we've spent the last few weeks on Code Redd Net revisiting some Classic Chan films. Now we return with a new recurring feature, one that aims to spotlight some of the best, most valuable and most interesting DVDs/Blu-rays on the market. Too often films released for home viewing provide little incentive for purchase beyond the quality of the film it contains. Our purpose here is to draw your attention to those discs laden with special features, special features that make repeated viewings worthwhile, that keep the DVD/Blu-ray in question spinning in your player for years. To that end, we can find no better way to kick things off than by returning to Rush Hour 2. In addition to being a beloved CRN Awards winner and longtime site/blog staple, it's also one of our favorite DVDs ever released. Find out why below.

Ricky, you sly son of a gun, just look at you.

Rush Hour 2 is not the best Jackie Chan film. In fact, looking over the items chronicled in our recent Classic Chan series, arguably eight of those ten films feature better fights, better stunts, and overall a more competent use of Chan's physical abilities. What those films lack, though, is the sheen of Rush Hour 2, its efficiency of storytelling and style. Undeniably, Rush Hour 2 is lean Hollywood filmmaking, all its excesses contained in 90 minutes and rounded off by the credits. Hollywood is at its best when taking something mediocre and inflating it to the absolute limit, usually via astronomical production values. So while Chan's choreography is below average in this film, so much else around him is of a higher quality (everything from the lighting, the sets, the cameras, to the film stock itself) that we can temporarily forget the handcuffs put on our favorite action star. It's a decent enough compromise for the Chan enthusiast and the casual viewer, I suppose.

Besides the quality of the film, the DVD for Rush Hour 2 really delivers the goods. As part of the abandoned Infinifilm brand of New Line, the Rush Hour 2 disc is loaded with stuff:

• Commentary with director Brett Ratner and writer Jeff Nathanson
• Featurettes: "Making Magic Out of Mire", "Fashion of Rush Hour 2", "Jackie Chan's Hong Kong Introduction", "Culture Clash: West Meets East", "Language Barrier", "Attaining International Stardom", "Kung Fu Choreography".
• Evolution of a Scene
• Visual Effects Deconstruction
• Deleted Scenes/Outtakes (with optional director/writer commentary)
• Theatrical Trailers
• Cast and Crew bios
• Fact Track
• DVD-rom with a script you can read alongside film
• as well as the usual plethora of language/subtitle options and chapter selection

This may not sound that impressive at first, but the DVD's Infinifilm option integrates almost every one of these elements into the film's presentation. Menus pop up onscreen, inviting you to watch short clips, snipped from the full featurettes listed above that deal directly with the scene.

In this example, the massage parlor fight is supplemented with material describing its construction. Play the clip and the disc returns you to the film at exactly the same point you were at before. Though the disc obviously needs a few seconds to gather up the selected data after you click an option, and a few more to get you back, it's nothing too jarring; and it helps that the clips are usually interesting and engage you more thoroughly with the film. Certainly the Infinifilm feature could become annoying for those watching the film for the first time, but it's not the default option on the disc. For those looking for a reason to watch it again, though, it's a perfect means to do so.

Outside of the Infinifilm, you can access all the supplemental material individually and in full. Though there's plenty of flatulent industry fluff, like "Fashion of Rush Hour 2" and "Making Magic Out of Mire", many of the other features are worth watching. Evolution of a Scene, essentially rehearsal footage of some of the more expensive/explosive scenes, is an interesting opportunity to see Jackie's method of choreography at work. I always appreciate the inclusion of deleted scenes, though in this case they were clearly deleted for a reason; same goes for the outtakes, really.

Brett Ratner and his screenwriter writer provide feature-length commentary and it's mostly banal stuff that gets regurgitated elsewhere on the disc. There's a bit too much gossip, and way too much Hollywood name-dropping, but on occasion they provide an insight or tow. One of the more intriguing special features is the Fact Track (above), an option that places a running stream of incidental notes on the lower part of the screen. These include useful biographical bits on Chan, Tucker, and the minor or incidental characters that surround them, as well as trivia regarding the scenery, shooting locations, and Snoopy's height relative to Tucker's racially-charged estimation of Chan's height. Like the Infinifilm option, though perhaps less exciting visually, Fact Track is yet another way to make a repeated viewing of the film seem novel. Strangely enough, it's possible to watch the film with the Fact Track, commentary, and Infinifilm features all running at the same time! It's a bit too much for the senses, I think, but it nonetheless proves that the disc is loaded not only with special features, but with a highly customizable engagement with them.

All things considered, the Rush Hour 2 Infinifilm DVD is one loaded with replay value. By my count, there's at least four-five different ways to watch the film: by itself, with Infinifilm, with commentary, with the fact track, and with some combination of the above options. This is in addition to the standalone full features accessible via the menu. It's too bad New Line gave up on the Infinifilm brand, because I wish all my DVDs/Blu-rays had this kind of depth.

Get the DVD on Amazon for $.01 right here (and make sure you follow the link to the Infinifilm product specifically, as there's another, stripped-down and feature-less version of the disc in circulation).

Classic Chan: Digging Around in the Archives

Seems a bit impractical, Jackie, but impressive nonetheless.

If you haven't had a look yet at our ongoing Classic Chan review series, we implore you to do so by checking out our reviews of Police Story and Police Story 2. Keep an eye out for more reviews in the coming weeks. In the meantime, though, you should know that there's a wealth of Jackie Chan content already awaiting you on Code Redd Net. Here's what you may be missing:

Reviews:

Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster
The Forbidden Kingdom
The Medallion
Rush Hour
Rush Hour 2
Rush Hour 3
Shanghai Knights
The Tuxedo
Twin Dragons

Code Redd Net Awards:

Best Jackie Chan Movie
Finest Fight

From our Finest Fights series (featuring spectacular embedded videos!):

Police Story
Jackie Chan's Thunderball
Jackie Chan's First Strike
Rumble in the [Vancouver] Bronx
Who Am I?

and, of course, there's always the golden Time Life CD box set Solid Gold Chan.

Danny should upgrade to a PS Vita. A higher resolution screen
would be much better for playing those games which Jackie always
forgets to give him.

We're Busy

"Excuse me, but don't you mean gettin' busy?"

Enjoy this picture of Ricky Tan; he's a busy man, like us. We know November has been a lean month at Code Redd Net, but we promise to have some exciting, new content for you in December. Posts, podcasts, all that. Keep watching the skies.

Solid Gold Chan

It's not a real thing, but Time Life should get on it right away, don't you think? We did all the work for them.

Jackie Chan's action films have marvelled audiences for decades with spectacular stunts and virtuoso martial arts choreography, and justly so. But what often goes unnoticed is his commitment to providing catchy credits music to accompany us out of the theater. It's high time these diddies got some shine. Enjoy our small compilation of four punch-perfect pop hits, and do so without paying five easy installments of $29.95!

 

First up is Ash's infectious "Kung Fu," from Rumble in the Bronx:

 

Next we have "That One Song, Remember?" from Police Story:

 

We also have something of a rarity on this set. It's the appropriately bouncy "Let's Bounce" by Chic and Erick Sermon, whoever he is, from Rush Hour 2. Though the video below has a picture of the RH2 soundtrack CD, this gem is not on it. It's too bad, really.





Finally, our personal favorite, the always radio-ready theme from Who Am I?, which for years we referred to succinctly as "WHATCHANNANIIIYOOOOOOOO". Turns out it's actually titled "Who Am I (Cantonese Theme)". Makes sense, even though we still prefer our more colloquial expression.



Self-Styled: The Graphic Arts of Code Redd Net

Code Redd Net has never had a budget, or an office, or an art department. Everything we've done, Chicken Man and I, we've done ourselves, on our own time, with our own skills. Some of our attempts were, shall we say, a trifle amateurish. This has resulted in some rather humorous graphics floating around in our archives, from the (g)olden days of Geocities. I've tried to utilize these old files whenever possible on the blog, but there's some that, stubbornly, just don't have a place around here. Here's a collection of these dated, perhaps unused, images.

As you can see, for a time we liked to have banners at the top of each page. I remember when we had a Beats page, even if nobody else does. Also, we really dug Rush Hour 2. And I don't know about you, but my favorite is certainly the News banner. Mr. T, Bill O'Reilly, and is that Peekaboo Jones from TimeSplitters? Goodness, yes it is.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Chicken Man nameplate collection. Obviously, we tried out a few different styles over the years, but none, I wager, were as aesthetically unappealing as that second one.

Man, I miss my Tour Bus, like Chicken Man misses his Lair, I'm sure. Anyway, we had some interesting ideas for pages. Grillz existed primarily as a means to making fun of X-Play and other things we disliked at the time, and I'm only guessing when I tell you that I think Toasts was its opposite, though we never wrote any that I know of.

What you see here is are a few makeshift logos for games and movies that, at the time, had not been released yet. Incidentally, both Spy Hunter 2 and Rush Hour 3 were decidedly mediocre. You can see it in Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's faces below; Jackie looks off into the distance, horrified, while Chris seems concerned, but stoically determined to meet his fate, that being the end of his relevance in pop culture.

Oh, and thank the good Lord these redesigned logos were never used. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I changed our name from "Code Redd Net" to the infinitely grotesque "The Code."

Finally, here's some random pictures I found in the archives. Not sure what they are doing in there, but perhaps they'll help to cleanse the palate. A sorbet, if you will.

Rush Hour 4?

I knew the series was on the downslide, but damn.

"Found no rice, but only explosions."

Rush Hour 2 Redux

Starring Mos Def and Jack Black, of course.

A Concise History of Code Redd Net

It all began on November 8, 2001, or thereabouts. Originally known as Code Redd.net, what was to become the Code Redd Net of today started innocently in ChickenMan’s basement during one of our marathon Saturday afternoon/evening gaming sessions. I had some experience in writing reviews for GameFAQs (my output during this time consisted of this charming piece) and my own personal sites (which I started up and dropped at an alarming pace and which, thank goodness, have long since ceased to exist). I suggested we start up a Geocities page and play around with its Pagebuilder feature, which required absolutely no knowledge of that tedious thing called HTML. All we needed was a name. I believe we bandied about a few ideas first before we decided upon our unusual moniker. Now, the exact details are fuzzy in my mind, but I do know that we took our name from the new (at the time, anyway) flavor of Mountain Dew, Code Red. As far as I can remember, our only justification for choosing that name was that were simply liked the soda a whole lot and we were strapped for ideas. Of course, to protect ourselves from litigation and brand confusion, however unlikely that seems now, we added an extra “d” to Redd. And that was that. We took on the aliases of Thrasher and ChickenMan to protect our loved ones from harassment or embarrassment, I suppose. Geocities.com/codreddsite was up and running, and slowly.

Reviews, always our bread and butter, were split between games and movies, though far more emphasis was placed on games than movies. Our first two reviews, Spy Hunter for PS2 and Rush Hour 2, have remained perennial favorites through a kind of affective blinding. In other words, our tastes have certainly matured beyond them, but we cannot untangle our memories from these objects. They stay with us no matter how much cultural education/exposure we receive, and that, I suppose, is in the very machinations of nostalgia, that’s how the phenomenon of mass culture works. Naturally, our reviews tended to cover only those things which we were interested enough in to rent or buy, hence the general scarcity of negative reviews (far as I can remember, we only scorched a few products, such as Die Another Day, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, Spy Hunter 2, and The Tuxedo). Our interaction with popular culture was limited to our tastes because we simply didn’t have the monies, connections, or inclinations to cover more items. I would argue, however, that this made our site more inclusive, more of an ultra-specific fan culture (which included our love for Jackie Chan, James Bond, Mr. T, Spider-Man, Sonic, and anything else we fond amusing or “cool”) which communicated with whatever audience we could muster by sheer enthusiasm, rather than by some notion of comprehensive “objectivity” espoused by the popular press. We had our tastes and we had to freedom to do as we pleased, and that was particularly pleasing to our younger selves.

Looking back now, though, for all of our inclusiveness, CRN was quite the ambitious undertaking for two doe-eyed middle-schoolers. We clearly tried to mimic the appearance of most game/movie review sites, and this was difficult because the Geocities Pagebuilder was a beast to handle back then. We also tried to provide many of the same services that they did – at one point, we had our Games and Movies pages (both of which were subdivided into Reviews and Previews), our Beats page, Staff pages, Opinions page, a News page, a Newsletter (and I have to wonder if we actually sent any newsletters out), a “Grillz” page (similar to Opinions, I suppose, but perhaps nastier in tone), Links, a Message Board, a Chat Room, and more. And not only that, we also branched out into “colonies” which aimed to exclusively cover Bond, Sonic, and Spider-Man topics. Our naïvely comprehensive approach strikes me as hilarious now, almost satirical. I wish we could say parody was our purpose, but we were earnestly trying to be a significant source of so-called “objective” commentary on media. Reading over our archives from those days, our earnestness is infectious rather than cloying.

When the original site was removed from Geocities following its closing in 2009, I nearly missed my chance to archive it. CRN was something which I had nearly forgotten about when I went to college. I made sure to let ChickenMan know about it, and we decided that a blog might be a nice way to continue on. College is a weird time for everyone. People change and move away, you make new friends and forget about others, and tastes/interests change immensely (fortunately, ChickenMan has stayed true to himself, though his insight has grown tremendously). No longer could ChickenMan and I spend our afternoons locked in a middle school keyboard lab (our “office” or “base of operations,” you might say) updating the site. Several states now separated us. Thankfully, the proliferation of digital technology made communication much easier and fluid across great distances, but it wasn’t until we had our respective degrees that we mobilized CRN once again.

Nostalgia does funny things to us, especially now, when our technology makes access to these fondly remembered products nearly instantaneous. You can download you memories now. It makes us fond for things which aren’t really “old,” or for things which didn’t interest us before (such as commercials and bad PS1 games). But if nostalgia has ever ringed true, CRN is as good an example as any other. And it moves beyond just remembering what once was; CRN has grown considerably, beyond a simple exercise in nostalgia. Our reviews have only gotten better, even though they share the same format (300 words or so of blocky, unorganized text, at my insistence), and we are far more prolific than ever before. We now review books as well, which, as ChickenMan has told me, seems like a strange fit in the CRN universe, and our extension into the social network has been nothing but a positive experience for us. We continue to grow our inclusive community.

When I look back at our old reviews, I often laugh at our prose, but not derisorily. I laugh joyfully at the words, or rather, between them. I can see the friendship which was the groundwork for CRN somewhere in the spaces. I hope this is visible to whatever readership we have or may have in the future. If it isn’t, and our readership is in fact nil, I know that this brand of nostalgia has served its purpose admirably.

Code Redd Net Awards: Best Movie

Finally, we conclude this afternoon with our selection for Best Movie. It's a sentimental pick, we admit. And the nominees are...

The Dark Knight (2008)
Rush Hour 2 (2001)
Fight Club (1999)
Transporter 2 (2005)
Casino Royale (2006)

And the winner is...

Rush Hour 2

Code Redd Net Awards: Best Jackie Chan Movie

Our next award is for Best Jackie Chan Movie. And the nominees are...

Rush Hour 2 (2001)
Jackie Chan's Who Am I? (1998)
Jackie Chan's First Strike (1996)
Mr. Nice Guy (1997)
Shanghai Noon (2000)

And the winner is...

Jackie Chan's Who Am I?

Movie Review: Rush Hour 3 (2007)

Thankfully, Chris Tucker dialed down the high-pitched yelling (mostly) in Rush Hour 3. Sure, he still acts like an ill-disciplined and insecure child, he feels as if he has to hit on anything with two legs and long hair (and you should see his reaction when he discovers that the woman he is about to score with is only wearing a wig), but at least he's quieter this time around, even if he insists on being offensive. And you would never make the same complaints about Jackie Chan. In the first Rush Hour, Chan came to LA and worked in tandem with Tucker to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese diplomat. In 2, Tucker vacationed in Hong Kong with Chan and solved a mystery involving the Triads and counterfeit "superbills." Now, in this third installment, our duo head to Paris to protect a woman who has access to information which could finally dismantle the Triads. Somewhere along the way we are introduced to Chan's brother, Kenji; of course, he has to fight him in the climax of the film set (where else?) in the Eiffel Tower. If you think about these films in order, you will see a steady drop in the quality and quantity of Chan's famous stunt work. We forgive this in the second film because of our aforementioned affectation for it (due to outside factors, of course), but Chan fans have so little to look forward to in Rush Hour 3: his fight with his brother is fun, but nothing else really stands out, except for an inexplicable dramatic increase in the number of Chris Tucker fights, which are obviously of a lesser quality than Chan's work. So while this is a decent enough way to round out series, it is a bit of whimper. Jackie Chan devotees will be disappointed, but more casual action fans could find worse things to do.

Friday From the Archives: Rush Hour 2 (2001)

Every Friday we celebrate the heritage of Code Redd Net by posting a retro-review from our considerable back catalogue of embarrassingly naive, but nonetheless entertaining and heartfelt, movie and game reviews. Please pardon the prose; most of these articles were written in our immediately post-pubescent years. Hopefully you find them as enjoyable as we do.

Rush Hour 2 is a curious thing for us at Code Redd Net. In many ways it's a pretty dumb (though innocuous) flick, but it has memories for us. Not only was it our first movie review back when we launched the site in late 2001, but it was the instigating force behind the website itself. The nostalgia we feel gleefully blinds our objective judgment. In this case, affect goes beyond the text. And looking at my review (rewritten in 2005, I believe) I see that I had this same idea in mind when reexamining the movie. Looking forward to our tenth anniversary in a few short weeks, I want to make sure that Rush Hour 2 is understood as a significant part of our history.

"You must be forewarned that my opinion on Rush Hour 2 may be slightly slanted. Objectively, I have a difficult time reviewing the film, because the memories I have of it are closely tied with a friendship, and the enjoyable time we had seeing the movie in theaters. But, just to be impartial, I'll try to review the film based solely on it merit, not personal recollections, however awesome they may be. No promise, though. The story begins with the bombing of the American embassy in Hong Kong, which kills two U.S. customs agents involved in uncovering a ring of smugglers controlling "superbills," extremely well-made counterfeit $100 bills. Naturally, Detective Lee and Detective Carter, portrayed by Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, respectively, become involved in the case. Together they track down Ricky Tan, the head of the Triads, a deadly posse of thugs from China. From that rather basic premise, we segue into the action scenes, which unfortunately are very disappointing, at least in comparison to some of the other films Chan has done. Rush Hour 2 was my introduction to Jackie Chan, and in searching out his previous films afterward, I've found that this is some of his weakest work, as far as the martial arts are concerned. The humor is fine, but not great, and the pace is exceptionally swift. I just cannot help my bias, but I find myself really enjoying Rush Hour 2 every time I watch it. Definitely not the best work of Jackie Chan, but a really pleasant action film all-around."

Finest Fights: Rush Hour 2 (2001)

Bringing you the best fight scenes available on YouTube, every Tuesday afternoon.

Enjoy two distinctly different fights from one of our favorite films, Rush Hour 2:

Movie Review: Rush Hour (1998)

Rush Hour 2 may be our sentimental favorite, but the original certainly has its strengths. For one, Jackie Chan's stunt work is far superior here than in the sequel. Though neither film really lets Chan's prowess completely loose (that is saved for less mainstream kung-fu fare, like First Strike and Who Am I?, where the story is tailored more specifically to showcasing action first and story second) in Rush Hour he has considerably more exciting and plentiful action scenes. You might consider this film (and its sequels, as well as other films made in the same buddy-cop-action genre, such as Shanghai Noon and Knights) a sort of primer for the uninitiated, and from here you can tackle his more straightforward kung-fu films if interested; there you will find Chan unshackled by the demands of Hollywood and its emphasis on dialogue. But the humor is brisk and lively in this one, though Chris Tucker is far more annoying here than in subsequent entries, spending his half of the screen time either yelling or reinforcing outrageous stereotypes, and quite often both simultaneously. The contrast between the high-pitched Tucker and the stoic determination of Chan is effective enough, though, and overall the film is extremely efficient storytelling. Recommended for Chan fans, but you might want to see First Strike or Who Am I? immediately afterwords if you want to really see what all the fuss is about.

Special Wednesday Edition From the Archives: The Tuxedo (2002)

Jackie Chan's movie's have always have always had a cult following up until Rush Hour, which brought him to mainstream America audiences. More recently, the tremendous success of Rush Hour 2 has signified Chan as a major international star. The Tuxedo, co-starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, is a major departure from the typical Jackie movie. It's also not one of his best. First off, the plot, while just barely adequate, is rather throw-away; it's really too far-fetched. Other than that, the comedy included here is good, and the action scenes are pretty tight. The whole movie is basically a spoof of spy flicks, which is a nice break from the more traditional kung-fu material. But, I found that I enjoyed Chan's more realistic chop-sockey action flicks (such as the terrific Rush Hour movies) more. It seems this movie focused on comedy, and to a lesser extent, action, which killed my buzz in the end. The total package offered here is worthy of your money, although many will feel a little let down, knowing it's potential.

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Preach on, Ricky Tan.